Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Five Faves - Story Collections

Short stories are one of my favorite literary forms so for today's Five Faves by a Theme I decided to chose my favorite single author short story collections from my 2014 reads. I read a total of twenty-five.

Some stats:
I
gave 5 Goodreads stars to nine of them; 4 stars to thirteen; 3 stars to
none; 2 stars to three; 1 or 0 stars to none; left none unfinished.

One English language one was by a British author, the other fourteen were by Americans.

So here are my favorite five (in the order I read them):

Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus
Read in early January.
Reading
“Leaving the Sea” is like turning an imperfect underwater somersault.
Everything feels right at first, and then something feels slightly out
of kilter. You open your eyes, break the surface sideways, and are
disoriented by the familiar.

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
Read in late January. An
outstanding debut collection. Watkins presents some interesting
characters and situations: gold prospectors in the 1800s, a modern
scavenger of misplaced fireworks, Manson cult members, young women in
impossible relationships, lost tourists. The landscapes of Nevada and
California are crucial elements in these stories.

Snow in May: Stories by Kseniya Melnik
Read in mid March. Most of the nine stories in this collection are set in the port town of Magadan in the far east of Russia. This is a superb collection from a talented young author who was born in Magadan and who immigrated to Alaska as a teenager.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak
Read in mid April.
Cristo designs a roller coaster, Johnny Depp performs a daring act for a
tourist bus, John Grisham has a title crisis, and on it goes. Dating,
family trips, closure, sex robots, friendship, the gifted all get their
turn in this fun collection.

I also read three multiple author anthologies, listened to one multi author/multi reader audio book (my only audio book for the year), read one graphic rendition of Kafka stories, and read a bunch of short stories online. And, because of their nature, I always have several collections going at the same time: some on my Kindle for reading in waiting rooms, one by my bedside, some to read between longer works.

9 comments:

YOU are my new hero! I love short stories, and so few people do. I haven't read any of these, but I have Leaving the Sea on my hulking TBR. So far this year, my favorite collection is Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich. :)

I adore short story collections (and anthologies) and my one reading regret this year is not reading them more. Do you follow The Short Story prize? I really wanted to read some books by the finalists.

I agree with Andi: I love short stories and I regret that so few people feel the same. With my now previous blog in French, I've organized five months dedicated to short stories' reading in two years with the hope to give the taste of them to others (and I has worked quite well).

I've read none of the collections you mention but I've noted Leaving the Sea and Piano Stories. Thank you!

(Sheer curiosity: which was the collection translated from the French you've read?)